A House Built From Ashes
by Sileny
Summary: The travel brochures aren't lying when they say that visiting Hoenn will change your life, except maybe this wasn't the change they were talking about. [Part 1/? of a series of works, but can be read as a standalone]


**A House Built From Ashes**

* * *

_The travel brochures aren't lying when they say that visiting Hoenn will change your life, except maybe this wasn't the change they were talking about._

* * *

The cottage in Mossdeep had belonged to Melanie's great-aunt. She'd been married in the back garden that stretched right down to the cliff edge many years ago. She'd raised three rambunctious children in the cozy little cottage with the cute picket fence and deceptively delicate-looking shutters. Melanie's great-aunt had lived a good life here, but then old age had set in, and she'd packed up and taken the two-hour ferry over to Lilycove to stay with one of her daughters. The house had stood empty after that; the keys had passed from hand to hand until finally, somehow, it landed in those of Melanie's mother.

Except Melanie's mother hadn't had a need for the house. She'd long since traded the warm southern seas of Hoenn that lapped right up to her front door in Pacifidlog Town for the cold waves off of Anistar, shimmering under the thousand points of refracted light from the giant sundial. These days, Melanie's mother only went back to Hoenn for family reunions or weddings or milestone birthdays. The keys had sat in a little dish on the kitchen counter, gathering dust.

And then, Melanie gets into the Accident.

.

Long story short, the Accident happens like this: Melanie is on a ten-day vacation in Hoenn, a Mauville-Slateport-Dewford plan of a trip that will end with a short domestic flight to Mossdeep to make sure the old cottage is aired out and in order. It's her last day in Dewford, so naturally she had headed down the short stretch of beach connecting the town to Granite Cave to look at the famed murals. Behind the antechamber had been a hiking trail, decorated by a signpost that announced the location of a designated stretch of pristine cave where trainers could try their hand at capturing Pokémon. No PvP battling allowed—the cave system was too delicate to withstand repeated onslaughts beyond wild encounters. Melanie, feeling brave, had ventured down the path with a few fellow tourists and Lairon at her side. Everything was fine.

And then everything was not. There was a great rumbling in the cave. Lairon had shifted his body sideways with a speed that was only rivaled at mealtimes and had tried to ram her back out to the main chamber. Melanie had taken one step, then two, before part of the wall had come down with a roar.

What she remembered next was fragmented: impossible weights on her leg and side, Lairon glowing like the sun, something large above her screaming, and Floette's Pokéball just barely out of reach. Later, she wakes up in Slateport General Hospital in the dull, taffy-like sort of comfort that can only happen when you're on a soup of heavy-duty painkillers.

Melanie's not interested in the whys behind the Accident, but everyone had assumed she must be. So she hears snatches here and there: two trainers went off-trail; two trainers had a battle; two competitive-level trainers went at it in a restricted zone with far more power than a friendly would call for. It's all over the news—local, national, _and _international. The rangers are still combing through the wreckage and the Dewford Historic Society is up in arms over potential damages to the murals. Melanie focuses on the physical therapy pamphlets a nurse had picked up for her and re-reads the same sentence over and over again, due only partially to her broken Hoennese.

Someone picks up Floette from the Pokémon Center for her. When she finally musters up the courage to ask about Lairon, all she gets is a shake of a head.

.

Physical therapy starts painfully on both the emotional and physical levels. There are steel pins and plates in both of Melanie's legs, one more so than the other. The injuries and extensive lie-ins had made her stiff and weak; the stitches only made her stiffer. The doctors tell her that she'll have to learn to walk again in no uncertain terms, and the nurses work each day to restore movement to a stubborn arm.

Melanie's parents fly in from Kalos, and some of her aunts flock in from Mauville. Melanie's mother reverts to her native Hoennese when she's distraught, accent thick from the Pacifidlog drawl she'd picked up on the little floating town years ago. Melanie endures until she can't stand it anymore—until the concern is smothering and the soothing noises her well-meaning family makes are grating. The nurses let her bring Floette out, and the little fairy takes to putting her flower down in a little vase on the windowsill so that she can bob near her shoulder, leaving only to shoo out the guests when everything gets too much.

Melanie feels like she's constantly swallowed a cotton ball, but that could be a side effect of her new medication. Or it could be the trauma talking, replaying in a fuzzy loop like a terrible low-budget stop animation film. Floette settles herself in the little space at her better side and lets Melanie stroke shaking fingers over silk-smooth petals. It helps, like the scent of her favorite potpourri that wafts through the room as she falls asleep, but even that doesn't really make up for the lack of a familiar rumbling by her bedside.

.

When Melanie's well enough to discuss being discharged, there's a large argument about where she's going to go. Her mother wants her to come home to Anistar, but Melanie thinks about airport security and all the pins and plates that she's now sporting. She thinks about the size of an airbus compartment, and then must immediately swallow down the urge to be sick. When her mother digs in her heels they come to an uncomfortable stalemate that lasts until visiting hours are over. Melanie's father finally just pushes his wife out with his sister-in-law and takes a seat on Melanie's bed. He's holding a thick booklet in his lap.

"Do you remember the old house by the sea?" he asks. He lifts the booklet. MOSSDEEP UNIVERSITY HOSPITAL is printed over it in large bold letters. The booklet has been tabbed in her father's usual steadfast and meticulous way.

He doesn't say much but he doesn't need to. The first tab opens to the hospital's mission, highlighted. The second to their offered programs, ranked and compared to other hospitals like Mauville Metropolitan and Anistar Memorial. Program qualifications. Program benefits. Costs. Sample schedules. Additional perks, like training sessions for Pokémon assistance qualifications for those who aim for a more independent life. Mossdeep attractions and how they could be of aid in the recovery process. Floette pats a small hand on Melanie's good knee.

Melanie thumbs mindlessly through the booklet. She looks at the spot where Lairon should be, at the foot of her bed. She says softly, "I'll think about it."

.

Three days shy of being discharged, she works up the nerve to go to the Pokémon Center. A volunteer wheels her out and down the block. One of Nurse Joy's Chanseys waves at them as they make their way through the lobby, then bobs out of view to fetch the kindly nurse.

Lairon—wrong, it's Aggron now—is being held in one of the heavily reinforced back rooms, a rare tenant at the center's intensive care unit. Nurse Joy tells them that he had been too injured to risk recalling and transporting to the larger Slateport Veterinarian Hospital when they had let him out at admission for triage, but thankfully, he had responded well to the center's available facilities. Now he's on heavy metal supplements and a pure iron ore diet. His armor is battered and broken and glued together haphazardly with harsh new growth.

When Melanie is wheeled in he lifts his great head sluggishly with a soft whuff before sidling over to lay as close as he can next to her chair. He used to be much smaller, she thinks; about the same size as the Eevee she had desperately wanted as a child but had never gotten. Now he's so big and so precious that she wouldn't trade him for two hundred Eevees.

"Hello," she says, smoothing a hand over the knobby steel of his armor. He'll have to be sanded down and polished to a shine, but that's a task for another day, when they're both feeling a bit better, and hopefully with less painkillers in either of them.

A low rumble of content starts building up in Aggron's throat. When he tilts his head to look up at her she feels like she's going to drown in the adoration and relief in his eyes. She leans over her chair so that she can give him two soft pats on an iron-clad cheek, the way he's always liked them.

"Let's go to Mossdeep," she says. He rumbles back at her. Even if he had to crawl, he would go anywhere with her. He hopes, desperately, that she knows.

.

By the time Melanie moves in, the old house on the sea cliffs had been given a fresh coat of robin egg blue paint. The picket fence up front had been straightened up and washed. Someone had weeded the garden and repaired the creaking gate that separated the yard from the open stretch of grass that dropped right off the edge of the cliff face a good twenty meters back. This is her house now. It still feels a little surreal.

Floette despairs. She despairs over the angle of the breeze, coming in fresh off the sea and carrying with it the ringing cry of what appears to be Mossdeep's entire nesting wingull population. She despairs over the distance from the house to the bus stop at the far end of the street, and then the ensuing ride into Mossdeep proper. But most importantly, she despairs over the state of the gardens. The soils on the northern edge of Mossdeep are poor and rocky, and she levels a disapproving look at Melanie. Her intention is clear: once they're settled in and feeling well, the garden is getting an extreme makeover.

Melanie's great-aunt hauls herself over from Lilycove, supported by a family member on one side and an equally wizened Breloom on the other. Both step back and hover when she pulls out a small but beautifully lacquered box from her purse. When Melanie opens it, a Shiny Stone is nestled in a cushion of rich velvet. She tries to hand it back on pure instinct alone—evolutionary stones aren't cheap—she can't possibly accept such a gift—

Great Aunt Rosa presses the box into Melanie's hands with a gnarled but strong hand. "I had been hoping to use it on a Roselia in my youth," she says. Her eyes crinkle into a well-worn smile. "I had no need for it, in the end. Not like you do, my dear."

She gives an almost conspiratorial nod to Floette before letting her escorts help her into the house, where the rest of the family is bustling about, setting up furniture and testing out the kitchen. There's a yell followed by a muffled crash, and then a cousin pokes his head out the window to yell that everything was fine. Melanie looks back down at the precious stone in her hands as Floette bobs down next to her.

"Would you like to?" she asks. The deep orange of the setting sun catches on the edges of the stone, softening its intense inner glow. Floette trills softly—yes—but puts a small hand on the lid of the box.

Melanie glances back at the house, where the rest of the family have moved onto setting up a long table and piling it high with food. She shuts the box with a small smile. "Later, then," she agrees. When she goes inside to place the box gently on the mantle, Great Aunt Rosa gives her a soft pleased smile.

.

When the sun starts to climb back out of the sea the next morning, Floette takes hold of the Shiny Stone. Light bursts from the stone that the fairy has cupped gently in her hands, wrapping and stretching around her tiny partner like ribbons. When it fades, Florges stands in front of her, all beauty and grace, thrumming with a soothing psychic energy. The early morning light catches at the delicate petals that wreath her head until it's like she's wearing a halo.

Melanie lets out the breath she hadn't been aware of holding. She should say something, but she doesn't know what. It's strange, because she's never struggled to find words when speaking to Floette before. A tiny, breathy, "_Oh_," finally manages to escape her.

Florges takes one of Melanie's hands in hers. She trills softly. Feelings like _hello _and _we have much to talk about _and _nothing will ever hurt you again _flicker around the edges of Melanie's mind as the fairy holds tight.

Melanie laughs softly. It had been so long since the last time she laughed that it hurts as it's dragged out of her throat. "I trust you," she says, and that's that.

.

Life in Mossdeep is easy enough to settle into. Florges walks her down to the bus station and sits with her the entire ride to PT. On the way home, they entertain the local children with talk about Kalosian fairies. Melanie's neighbors are nice, if not a little excitable, because the family next door has a little boy who's all bright and shiny-eyed when he sees Aggron, who in turn takes to napping in the sun like a fish to water. On the good days the view from her house is amazing—just miles and miles of crystal clear waters that stretched endlessly into the horizon, thick cotton-candy clouds dotting the perimeter, and wingull wheeling high above. Slowly, after they've been assured that Melanie has each of their numbers in her brand new PokéNav Plus, her family disperses back into their own lives.

Florges tackles the sorry excuse of their garden with a vengeance. They pore over the Lilycove Department Store's mail-order catalogue for a mini mulch-maker, topsoil, and a staggering assortment of seeds. There are grand plans in place for the arched trellis. A short argument breaks out over how much space ought to be allotted for vegetables as opposed to ornamentals, as well as the exact curve of the stone path that they're inevitably going to lay down. Laying the groundwork for the garden is easy with the balmy weather and Aggron helping to till the soil, slowly stretching out mending muscles as part of his own therapy. When their delivery comes, Florges putters about happily while Melanie and Aggron relax against the wall, being useless.

There's only one house past Melanie's on their secluded street. It belongs to a young man about her age with a stunning sense of style that her Kalosian side can appreciate. He's out and about a lot, and they only cross paths once, shortly after the first week that she moves in. There's just enough time to exchange a quick greeting, and then her neighbor is shaking her hand, apologizing for having to dash, and hopping off on the back of a Skarmory who promptly launches itself into the sky.

There are many good days on Mossdeep.

But on the bad days, Melanie wakes up and even the faintest of early morning chills is enough for her to ache. It's a colossal effort to convince her joints to turn and a monumental undertaking to just sit up. The clock will tick by as she clutches at her knee and tries to will the pain down—just a little—just _enough— _so that she can reach for the glass of water and painkillers that she keeps on the bedside table. Sometimes Florges has to fetch them for her, and the humiliation and frustration builds with every pained shuffle through the house. On the bad days, every little clatter reminds her of the split second rumble before Granite Cave crumbled down, and she has to have the house locked down in radio silence so as to not hear a single whisper about anything related to battling.

On the very worst days, she can't even enter a room and close the door behind her without panicking, even with Florges at her side. Aggron, too big to safely let out in the house, can only shake in his ball as she clutches it to her. There aren't a lot of those days, thankfully, but there are enough.

.

The counselor asks her if she can pinpoint what exact part of the Accident frightens her the most. Melanie sits there and thinks and thinks and thinks. She cannot answer.

But that's a lie. She thinks about waking up at Slateport General and having only empty space next to her bed where Lairon should have been. She thinks about how the world had crashed down around her and Floette had been just out of reach.

"What will I do if you guys aren't here?" she whispers, when they spend an afternoon on their new patio with the cute little solrock cakes they'd picked up on their way home. She wishes she was braver, but it feels like any scrap of bravery she had was buried deep underneath the stones in that ancient cave. If only a ranger could find it again for her.

Aggron surges forward. It's a delicate process for him to press his heavy snout against her side without gouging her with his horns. Florges, too, grabs at her hands. Melanie swallows thickly.

"Silly, right?" she asks, voice a thin warble. There's an almost frantic nod from Florges. Aggron presses closer. They stay outside like that for a very long time, until the cakes are completely forgotten and the tea has gone cold.

.

Some days, Melanie dreams about what could have been.

She could have finished her Hoenn trip with no incidence. Could have flown back to Kalos to throw herself back into her fun but unremarkable career as a Coordinator in Kalos' niche Pokémon Contest industry. Could have applied to that design firm in Lumiose that she had been on the fence about. Could have moved to the City of Light where fairy-tale-esque Kalosian romances happened. The world could have been her clamperl.

Sometimes, Melanie stops to consider how things could have been so much worse.

One person had died in that cave-in. It could have easily been her. If Aggron had been any less stubborn, or his injuries any more severe, she could have lost him too. Floette could have been buried alive, safe in her ball until it inevitably shattered from the pressure of tons of rock dropping down atop it. She could have lost both legs and the arm, or any combination of them, and while it probably wouldn't have been the end of the world it would have still been devastating.

Most of the time though, Melanie is not entirely sure what she's feeling, to be completely honest. She feels like a giant ball of bitterness and relief, all at once, with nowhere to release it. There are things that she's learning to love about Mossdeep and her house and the new life that she's clawing back for herself, but at the same time she can't shake off the hate for the circumstances that led her here. When the sweet seven-year-old child next door chatters about wanting to be a super strong trainer like their city's Gym Leaders, or even the Champion, her instinctual reaction is to recoil back because all she can think about are those two trainers who couldn't follow basic safety rules. The child keeps chattering, but all Melanie can wonder is _what next? _What would come after he surpassed a Gym Leader, after he shot past the Champion? What would he have to crush in order to climb that high to begin with? What was the _point? _

Florges has to put a hand on her shoulder then and nudge her with a stream of soothing psychic pulses, and when her aromatherapy finally kicks in and Melanie calms herself she feels horrible almost immediately. He's only seven, and nearly every seven-year-old dreams of becoming a Pokémon Master. He has a hundred and counting different paths he can choose from, and most of them will probably see him growing into a compassionate adult. Besides, what kind of person projects their terrible experiences onto a _child _, of all people?

She wars with these feelings constantly, and because she doesn't know what to do with them she opts to just keep herself busy. She tidies up the garden, huffing good-naturedly when all Florges has to do is breeze past for the stubborn buds to pop open. She buys the cute little lace-trimmed linens she spies at the summer market because they go well with her curtains. When her nephew goes on a school trip to Lavaridge Town and sends her chimecho-shaped windchimes, she resolves to spend an afternoon sometime with Florges so that they can hunt around for the best place to hang them up. She doggedly goes to PT even when she just wants to stay in bed, and she dedicates herself to taking Aggron out for walks along the southern beaches as the sun steals back into the ocean.

Embarrassingly, when she finally graduates from the walker, she starts to cry right there in the hospital lobby. All these weeks and months she had been listening to her rehab team tell her about her progress, had been listening to the encouragement from her ever-supportive family, but it had been hard to believe when she was still tied to the walker. Now though—now, it finally feels like she's taking that one tiny step towards regaining what she once had.

"I wish I was a kid taking my first steps," she confesses to Florges when she finally gets the tears to stop. At least, at that point in time, she was certain she had been laughing.

.

"How are you feeling today?" the counselor asks her when they sit down for their session, and Melanie surprises them both when she says, with as much honesty and certainty that she can muster:

"I think I'm doing the best I can at the moment, and I think that this is the first time that I'm more OK with that than not."

When she stares at the counselor with wide eyes, she gets an encouraging smile and a little nod, so she plows on. The words tumble out of her like a waterfall, and this feels nice, because even though she's been updating her family on her progress all this time everyone gets a different snippet. This is the first time that she's sat down with anyone and just… said it all. Every little thing. The words come and keep on coming, and when she's finally drained of them all, their hour-long session is almost all done.

"I feel like this life you have now is finally starting to really _feel _like your life, and not just a consequence of what happened to you," the counselor remarks as she wraps their session up, and that floors Melanie. She had never stopped to think about it that way, but now she thinks she can see some of the pieces fall into place. When was the last time she dreamed about Lumiose? Or when she had thought the world she was supposed to have was an ocean away in Kalos? She was starting to settle in Mossdeep, she realized—had started to find her favorite place on the beach to walk to; had her favorite bakery two streets away from the hospital which had the best garlic twists; had even, she realized with a start, booked herself tickets to the star show at the space center next month with nothing but giddy anticipation for a fun night out. She hadn't consciously thought of Granite Cave and the what-could-haves in weeks.

"That's—that's good, right?" she asks, voice terribly small next to how her heart is swelling.

"It can be what you want it to be."

"I want it to be good," Melanie says. "I want it to be, so that when I get bad days it's just that: one single bad day. Do you think I'll ever get there?"

"I think you will," the counselor says, honest as ever, "although it might come later than you wanted it to, or even sooner."

Melanie nods. She thumbs the little spheal keychain that the neighbor's child had given her as thanks for being allowed to help work Aggron through some of his light training. "I think," she starts hesitantly, but her voice gradually steadies itself out as she keeps going. "I think that the next time the neighbor's kid tells me that he wants to be a super strong trainer, I'd like to be able to look him in the eye and tell him that I'm rooting for him. Genuinely." She gives the counselor a wobbly smile. "That'd be nice, wouldn't it?"

She feels buoyed when the counselor gives her an answering smile, and if she happens to stop by the bakery to buy garlic twists for herself _and _a slice of oran berry shortcake for her neighbor, well, that's nobody else's business but hers.


End file.
